Free Budget Template

Keep track of your income and expenses using our free budget template. It is super easy. Just enter your monthly income and expenditures in the table below and click Calculate! The calculator will give you a breakdown of what you spend on each item. Expand each category to enter specific numbers. Don’t worry, we don’t save any of your data. Once you are done, you can click Export to Excel to download the template to a spreadsheet and track expenses over time.

This budget calculator is meant for educational purposes only. It is not meant to be used as a replacement for professional financial advice. Have fun with it.

 

How to use this Free Budget Template

In the income section, enter monthly income from various income streams. There is an input field for entering any balance from the previous period.

The Outflows section has various sub-categories. Each one is expandable. Click on the + sign to expand the category. For example, the home category includes expenses related to mortgage, rent, home insurance, etc. Most categories are self-explanatory.

Non-Discretionary expenses include your needs such as food, medical bills, child care, etc. Discretionary expenses include your wants. These are occasional expenses that you enjoy spending money on. For example, eating out, concerts, vacation, etc may be fun, you can live without them. These are the expenses that you can cut down to bring your budget in balance.

There is a reason I have put Investments under the outflows category. I want you to be deliberate about investing. I want you to consider this category as non-optional. This will be your first step towards building wealth. Once you set up your investment account, you want to keep adding to it each month and never ‘need’ to make a withdrawal.

Now Track your earnings and expenses with the free Budget template in Excel

Now, keep a budget for a few months (at least a year) so you can get a sense of all kinds of expenses. Typically, your gift category will be higher around the holidays. Education may be higher in early fall. When you track your expenses for an entire year, you will record all your seasonal expenses. The good thing about this calculator is that you can download it to a spreadsheet. Copy the $ amounts to a new column each month and then track them. Once you have a few months of data you should be able to see which direction your income and expenses are moving.

You may realize that some expenses are completely unnecessary. For example, you’ll realize that you spent way too much on that concert. Perhaps, you may even realize that perhaps you can afford a cup of coffee at Starbucks every week. Whatever you do, make room for intentional investing in your budget.

What if you hate budgets and don’t want to use a budget template?

I don’t like to keep a budget. I hate the process of documenting each income and expense item. However, before a big financial decision, event or change, I sit down and track my expenses and income holistically. For example, when we were buying our house, we we through all our bank accounts and downloaded all the income and expense items in an excel spreadsheet. Then we just added all items with a positive sign together in an income category. We did the same with the items with a negative sign. We did that for records going back a couple of years. That gave us an idea of roughly what our expenses are. Except rent and a few other expenses, our other expenses would remain the same. That gave us an idea of how much house we could afford.

Here are some of our other calculators that you can use. Use our debt calculator to pay down debt fast. Our retirement calculator will help you understand how much you need to save to be able to retire comfortably.